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DroidJason1 (3589319) writes "Microsoft has released the highly anticipated Windows 8.1 Update, adding numerous improvements for non-touch consumers based on feedback. It is also a required update for Windows 8.1, otherwise consumers will no get any future security updates after May 2014. Most of the changes in the update are designed to appease non-touch users, with options to show apps on the desktop taskbar, the ability to see show the taskbar above apps, and a new title bar at the top of apps with options to minimize, close, or snap apps."

Well, it's a start. I doubt I'm unique in that I won't be happy until I get a proper, Win 7 Start menu back, at least as an option. Live tiles on my desktop would be nice too.

Basically, give me back the Win 7 UI with the ability to put live tiles on the desktop, and run apps in a windows. Remember "windows"? Call be weird, but I'd like a version of Windows with, you know, windows.

For my tablet and phone, I like touch. For a desktop? I can't even understand why you would.

I posted in another thread several examples; most of them revolving around a kitchen or living room 'family computer' especially the common scenario where the keyboard and mouse stored in a drawer.

Then for various quick casual interactions, like to check the weather, check twitter/facebook, start a netflix movie, start playing some music... etc you do it all with the screen without even bothering to get out the mouse and keyboard.

When they want to do any real work they pull out the kb and mouse and don't touch the screen.

I know people who have those big desktop all in one touch screens, and that's how they use them.

Is it a critical must have feature? I don't think so, but its convenient, and its not like they paid a lot extra for it vs a non-touchscreen version.

I liked gadgets, too. Minor things like a desktop clock, calendar, weather, scrachpad, that kind of thing helps your workflow and save you the time and risk of looking for some random shareware solution. I was never too clear on any security problems with gadgets, thought they were sandboxed. I figured they got dropped because Microsoft just decided the desktop was history and all is Metro. Same reason I figured this or that UI bug in 7 would never get fixed.

Windows gadgets were essentially borderless IE windows that ran in the local zone. This means they could CreateObject(...) ActiveX libraries via scripting that could do, well, anything to your system. The sandbox didn't matter at that point.

In other words, they might have been a good idea at the time, but I stopped using them after a few days because they used up so much damned memory. Seriously guys, a clock widget doesn't take 200+ MB of RAM. Or, at least, it shouldn't in any sane world.

And, from the sounds of it, Microsoft didn't make a framework which was secure or safe.

A little single-purpose widget should be a small, lightweight thing that does one thing. But even the ones Microsoft shipped were overly bloated things which shouldn't have existed.

I don't think "cool and trendy" were what defined the failure of those. Bloated and insecure, but not cool and trendy.

Well, someone had to figure out how to use the memory over 640K, because Billy Boy hadn't yet done so.

It's OK, it happens to all of us. Just think of all the fun you'll have telling your grandchildren about loading programs from cassette tape, or typing in the source code from a magazine. That should be good for some laughs... because you'll need to explain both concepts to them.

If you're really old you can tell them stories about toggling in boot sequences or using punch cards. That'll really blow thei

I remember doing that stuff... it was kind of fun in its own way. I guess I'm "really old"...:)

LOL, here I'm using "really old" in such a way as to mean "my age or older".

Was talking to someone the other day, and apparently his kid had found his cassette tapes -- he said it took 10 minutes to explain that it used to be for playing music, and another 5 minutes to convince that he wasn't joking.

I can only imagine trying to explain the function of rabbit ears, or how the youngest person in the room was the TV remote. And don't even get me started on black and white TV with 3 stations.;-)

Wow, really can't tell if this is sarcasm or not (from the linked MSDN Blog entry)

It does NOT include the Start menu that you may have seen/heard about at the recent Build conference. That is some exciting near-future stuff, which demonstrates our on-going commitment to deliver on customer feedback.

Wow, really can't tell if this is sarcasm or not (from the linked MSDN Blog entry)

No, the reality detachment is part of the job requirements. Engineers might be able to keep a straight face for a sales meeting or two, but to really sell moderately good products well you have to drink your own kool-aid. Even when I'm on their side and they're not trying to sell me anything, everyone from marketing and sales I've ever met seems to have an over inflated view of the software's features, capabilities, quality and suitability for whatever the client asks for and trying to take them down a notc

I agree. I lived with Win8 for a month or so but just got so annoyed having to slide my mouse around just to close a window and having to fight just to get to the desktop. I gave it a good try, but then I just booted the whole thing and went back to Win7.

It wasn't a lack of willingness to adapt, it was because the interface clearly was not aimed at traditional desktop use. And I have no desire whatsoever for a touch screen - one at the size I would need is not only prohibitively expensive for what I'd

It's not a matter of learning something new. It's a matter of lost functionality. It's a matter of the additional time required to accomplish specific tasks. Management at Microsoft, as well as other companies (such as Dice), seem to gloss over functionality in favor of flash. The decision makers are no longer power users.

There is a screenshot (not photoshopped!) of a development build with live tiles in start menu (instead of the desktop) and a modern UI app (Mail) in a window, so maybe the future will bring something roughly like that you wish for. See here [theregister.co.uk].

Some of the changes are actually pretty good. The hover-over title bar on Metro Apps seems like a no-brainer. The hover-over, universal task bar for easy app switching is also a really good idea. Right-clicking works now on the Start Screen... where have you been?

I mean, it's real easy to see these things in hindsight, but you gotta wonder whether anyone in Microsoft was testing this out on desktops with large screens, and didn't reflexively hit the right-button and expect something to appear. I mean,

Any good open source file manager replacements for Windows out there (Classic Shell does give you some good options). I know I wrote a working file manager back when I wanted to teach myself Winforms - wonder if I still have the source somewhere.

I see a lot of potential for servers, where I want status information displayed on the desktop. There are many hacks to display static stuff like machine name and IP address in use today, but adding real-time server health info would be nice. It's rare to connect directly to the desktop on a server, but when you do it's nice to have everything you typically care about pre-packaged for you.

In general, live tiles are good for machines you don't often use directly that often, or use for displaying some specif

A long long time ago,I can still remember how that NT kernel made me smile.And I knew that if I had my chance,I'd write a helluva lot cool VB 6 apps.And maybe my manager would be happy for a while.

But April made me shiver,With each Win 8 PC I'd deliver.Bad news in the staffroom steps.And I couldn't take one more step.

I can't remember if I cried,When I read about some XP user heaved a sigh.But something touched me deep inside.The day Windows XP died.

So bye bye Windows XP has died.Rode my Segway to the to the levy,But the levy was dry.And good ol' sysadmins were drinking coffee and Sprite,Singing "This is the day Windows XP has died,This is the day Windows XP has died."

The amazing thing (to me, anyway) is that I always hated the start menu. Never liked having such redundancy... rather than giving me some flexibility in how applications are organized you make this ghetto of delicate "shortcuts", requiring installers for even the most simple binaries.

And yet, what they replaced it with is so much worse that I find myself wishing for it back.

I like the start menu for what it is: a comprehensive tree of everything I have installed

But that's not quite what it is - it's a tree of everything that decided to put stuff there. If you manually dragged an exe to Program Files, no show. If some uninstaller didn't remember the shortcut, you have a dead link. Worse, it's an idea decidedly rooted in a single-user machine, so exterminating an entry means looking in a few different places that they added to accommodate multiple users.

I really do like Windows 7 as well. Still not sold on the Start Menu:) At least in 7 it rarely bothers me. Frequent programs I have pinned to the task bar so that I can use the "pinned" feature in the right-click menu. Less-frequently accessed stuff can be accessed with a quick tap of the Windows button and a few letters from the name. I was quite shocked when I moved to Windows 8. I gave it a year and still hated it. When the hard drive died and I found out how horrid Windows 8 backup is, I moved back to 7.

But that's not quite what it is - it's a tree of everything that decided to put stuff there. If you manually dragged an exe to Program Files, no show. If some uninstaller didn't remember the shortcut, you have a dead link. Worse, it's an idea decidedly rooted in a single-user machine, so exterminating an entry means looking in a few different places that they added to accommodate multiple users.

Those are all really Windows XP complaints though. I don't have these problems with Win 7, other than the couple of lingering tools I use with no Windows installer. The combination of MS's open source installer tools (WIX) and the "side by side" fix for DLL Hell means almost everything has proper packaging in Windows now.

I'm forced to use Win 8 in a couple of places myself - thank goodness for Classic Shell!

Yeah, like I said in the other branch of this thread, Windows 7 hardly ever gets in my way. It cleaned up a lot of rough edges in XP, and it includes a (mostly) useful backup program that can restore from images. I like it a lot, and my one-year "upgrade" to Windows 8 was a mistake.

I still get irritated every time I install something like Putty, where I have to drag the EXE to a folder, make a shortcut, and then drag that to the Start menu. To be fair, you can drag it directly to the Start Menu. I'm sure th

Don't worry, I'm sure you'll enjoy the bitching and moaning when Win9 is released since it's supposed to be x64 only. Just imagine the whining and crying... "Y U NO SUPPORT x32!!!1111ELEVENTYONE1111!!!" Oh I can see it now...good times, it's just going to be like the nuts who couldn't be bothered to build/buy a new $250 PC and move to Win7 away from XP, you know the ones who only use their PC's for email and browsing. And then cry about the EoL for XP...and the 4 year extension date they got. It *might*

No I'm not misunderstanding. You're simply not paying attention to what's going on. There's a difference between an emulation layer, and native support. Currently we have multiple flavors of OS's with native support in either flavor, in a few years we're going to have a single flavor of OS support with an extreme drop off in support for x32. We're already seeing this in gaming with x32 binaries being thrown into the trashbin, and the entire codebase thrown and ditched. The most recent example in gaming of zero x32 support is Watch Dogs [bluesnews.com] for the PC.

Windows 3.1 -> workedWindows 98 -> crashed but worked sometimesWindows ME -> just crashedWindows XP -> worked, but has it's drawbacks (64bit version was better, but never really useful due to missing drivers)Windows Vista -> too much trouble to useWindows 7 -> useful, but not as customizable as XPWindows 8.x -> not so useful if you don't have a touch screen, less and less accessible customizations possibleWindows 9 -> hoping that Windows 8 is like Vista and Windows 9 will be useful l

For the record NT4 with SP 6 and Internet Explorer...I want to say 4 or 5 I don't remember...was incredibly stable and tough (IE added a few new features for making getting on the internet easier). Could not crash that thing no matter what. It really blew my mind having only ever otherwise used 3.1 and 95 at the time. I used it on my home PC for years. Had the latest directx included until well into windows 2000's life actually. I only switched because I had immediate access to XP (I want to say january 20

It's probably the refusal of many corporations to upgrade to Windows 8 that got Microsoft to make these changes but it's still a win for everyone.
When designing Windows 8 the new Start screen looked a perfect plan to get the masses to buy apps through their store and thus getting more revenue from Windows. It'd also get them used to the UI shared by Windows Phone which would surely get the fledging smartphone platform many more users.
So when so many people refused to use Win 8 they must've thought "If we backtrack a bit we'll get many people to change to Windows 8, if we don't, we'll get fewer".
It's also good to see that Microsoft no longer has near infinite power on the PC world. I'm currently starting to fear Google much more (they know so much about us...) but that's another topic

We get our machines stickered with Win8 licenses, and then immediately blast that shit off the drive and lay down our Win7 image. Our enterprise agreement allows us N-1 versioning, so we buy the Win8 licenses just in case Windows 8 turns into something that is actually useable someday, or worst case, take advantage of cheap license upgrades for N+1.

There is also the question of all the applications that just are not compatible or are just plain not supported on win8. This is why the place I work migrated to win7 instead of win8 we stall have critical applications that are not compatible or just plain not supported by the manufacture on win8.

Worse, it means retraining, it means loss of productivity, at least in the short term and it brings absolutely no advantage at all to the business workstation. Windows 7 was still part of an evolution from Windows 95. Much smoother and better done, but still, someone coming from XP could, after a few minutes, work in full swing.

Whether the Metro UI is better or not by some subjective, or heck, even objective standard is irrelevant. What is relevant is familiarity. QWERTY may not be the best keyboard layout, VHS may not have been better than Beta, and English spelling rules are a nightmare, but all three were familiar and dominant, and even some technical superiority of alternatives couldn't overcome the level of penetration that they enjoyed.

To my mind, it looks as if Metro will simply become another iteration of the old Active Desktop/Gadgets paradigm, and will likely be ignored by the bulk of PC users.

Think of it like someone accidentally wiped a decent portion of Desktop code from Windows 8's source and now they've had to slowly add stuff back without breaking anything, taking the opportunity to rewrite decades-old code along the way.

It even sounds plausible as an alternative to "Everyone at Microsoft went insane at once and the result was Windows 8."

Last week after my disk totally crashed I had to decide to re-install Window 8 and re-install a long list of apps - several which are updates and require the original disk (ah where are they)....hmmmm I thought here goes the day.

I decided to install CentOS Desktop instead. I am familiar with CentOS in the server mode as I use it on my dedicated server. Within an hour I was back up and running and being productive in my consulting business. My QHD / Nvidia graphic card were recognized and drivers installed, HP printer setup was simple, digital camera is recognized, scanner, etc. I really prefer the Gnome 2 interface to Windows 8 (and even Gnome 3) it stays out of my way and lets me get my work done efficiently.

I really haven't missed Windows at this point... well maybe Notepad++ just a little and haven't figured out what to do about Quickbooks yet. Maybe I can install enough plugins to get Gedit to be a reasonable editor and I may have to setup a windows virtual machine to run Quickbooks or find an alternative.

This morning on the radio I overheard an advertisement offering a Windows "speed-up service" with the main pitch being that over time your Windows machine become slower and slower being encumbered with cruft, malware, "help functions", virus, etc.. I couldn't keep from smiling.

Thanks for the recommendation. At the time I just needed to get up and running quick... now i have more time to investigate some alternative text editors.

I also thought I was going to miss WinSCP but the gnome "places" is actually a better solution for the work I do which is largely editing files on remote servers. Also tabbed terminal app cleans up the workspace as opposed to numerous putty windows and virtual workspaces... oh my.

"I maintain my stance that Windows 9.5 will be the version that changes everything, with Windows 9.8 mostly getting it right."

Nice joke, but I'm actually hoping for this. It would be poetic justice.

Microsoft's new CEO (with a tough to remember name!) Satya Nadella at least seems to be coming from an engineering perspective rather than Steve B's pure marketing. So after he gets settled, I in fact really am hoping he'll be the next Dave Cutler who pulls a stunning new revision to Windows that really makes *al

The Scene: A packed Moe's Tavern, with the tills ringing and overflowing due to sales of the 'Flaming Moe' beverage. Cue a disgruntled Homer Simpson...Homer: Hey Moe, you just..... you just lost yourself a customer.Moe: Yeah you can use it!

Weight of the world got you down and you wanna end your life
Bills to pay, a dead-end job, and problems with the wive
Well don't throw in the towel, 'cause there's a place right down the block
Where you can drink all your miseries away
At "Flaming Moe's"Let's all go to "Flaming Moe's"
Happiness is just a Flaming Moe away
Happiness is just a Flaming Moe away

I like Win 8.1. It's fast and reliable. I don't think it has ever crashed.

I can do everything I want pretty easily: edit videos, produce music, play games, run Steam, run overclocked hardware.

Yes, I'm sure you can do all that stuff that the cool kids are doing. I don't see anyone here questioning Windows 8's capabilities; people are complaining about the fact that it's a tablet interface that's been shoehorned into a desktop, and everything about it is designed to push you back to the tablet interface (which, conveniently for Microsoft, is a walled garden that they control).

At any rate, Windows 7 does all that cool kid stuff too, and the interface is sensible for desktop users.

My take is that the start menu required a "lot" of work to maintain if you actually wanted it to be a useful hierarchy. If you just let stuff install by default and never changed things, then I think it turned into more of an almost-not-hierarchical view of a bunch of crap, personally. It'd be one thing if programs installed an icon or two (or even a submenu) under categories like Games/Productivity/Development/etc. like you get with Linux distros, but that would require cross-vendor cooperation (perhaps enforced by MS); instead you just got programs would install to Start Menu/Programs/My Crappy Company/My Crappy Software/* or, even worse, Start Menu/Programs/My Crappy Software and Start Menu/Programs/Help For My Crappy Software and Start Menu/Programs/Visit My Crappy Website etc.

I hesitate to call that "useful" personally, and it's the main reason that once Vista introduced the search functionality I very rarely actually navigated the start menu itself. On Vista/7 navigating it was actually a lot worse than it was in previous versions IMO because everything got squashed into a very small space as opposed to getting expanded out a bit more; but I was one of those weirdos who used Vista by choice and a lot of that was due to the search feature, because that made up for everything else I saw wrong with it. (I discovered Launchy a bit too late.)

I don't know what to think of 8. Vista/7 got me spoiled with the search feature so that's what I use on 8 (I also use that by choice...), and as a result my day-to-day use is basically identical between 7 and 8, and I basically never use the start screen except via search. I feel like the default program launcher on 8 (what you get when you hit the Windows key/button) requires the same sort of manual maintenance as the start menu "needed", and I haven't bothered to do that. The all programs menu I think works better than the start menu if you left the latter alone. People complain about how the start screen takes over your whole display, but I view that as a virtue -- it means a lot more can be displayed at once and, I think, it's easier to scan. I've also never wanted to see something I had open when I was figuring out what to launch. The down side is that it basically collapses the heirarchy -- but I think that unless you groom the start menu yourself, there's usually very little meaningful hierarchy for it to collapse.

That's my opinion anyway. (And no, I do not and never have had a relationship with MS.)

I guess you know more than those usability experts who said otherwise.

While I'm 100% with you that Windows 8's UI is a steaming pile of stupid, it must be pointed out that this particular appeal to authority is poorly used, especially here.

It was "Usability experts" who came up with the idiotic concept of "unified interfaces," use cases be damned, in the first place. And now everyone who makes an OS now wants us to use our desktop machines like they're friggin' cell phones.

It sucks currently, because most mom's, pop's, and joe plummer are all switching to touch devices for most of their needs because frankly looking at cat videos or updating my facebook status are about the pinnacle of computing purposes for most people.

For everyone who wants to 'do stuff' with their computers, there will still be a PC market, but don't expect to see the perfectly functional computer anymore, since we're now in the proverbial dog house. The same happened with consoles where around the PS2 era

Let me walk you through the steps as I do them on my test VM (default Win 8.1 install, no added software)

Get the the top level of the Metro UI (I still have not figured out how to do this without hitting the windows key on my keyboard. If you're buried multiple levels deep in something, or running something in desktop mode, there's no intuitive way to do this without a touchscreen)

Move your mouse to the bottom right corner of the screen. A tiny transparent icon will appear in the very bottom corner that only displays while the mouse is in motion. This icon is the traditional "minimize" icon. Pretty intuitive that I should go interact with it to do something not present on the home screen.

Hover over this icon, but don't click or right-click! Even though every other interactive icon that appears in Metro requires clicking to engage. If you click it, it minimizes. If you right-click, some other weird bar pops up from the bottom of the screen. Hover, but don't click.

A row of icons will slide in. Most seem relatively intuitive. Other than the convoluted way to get them onscreen, I have little complaint about their appearance or overall functions (other than the one with the Windows logo which does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING because I'm already in the Metro home screen). Click on the one for settings. Really.... settings?

A new menu comes in, with some pretty useless options for Start, Tiles and Help a ton of empty space, and a row of buttons at the bottom. Oh, and another option under that, which looks like a label but is actually where all the "real" settings are hidden. Ignore that for now and click on the button labeled power.

A popup menu appears, select "shut down". I've gone through 5 distinctly different interface methods just to do a shutdown.

Meanwhile, Metro is trying to give me helpful hints to swipe in from the edge of the screen. These "hints" overlay the actual menus I'm trying to use, and have no way to dismiss. Metro really wants me to try swiping and won't dismiss these unless I follow the instructions, even though I have no touchscreen.

Why is it so difficult to just shutdown? Everyone has been taught for years that you must do safe shutdowns on Windows, so let's undo that all in swoop by making a safe shutdown exceedingly difficult to get to?

Here's another example. On my default install, I have news, stocks, etc on the main screen of Metro. OK, I don't care for it, but I can live with it. But the only application (outside of IE) that gets a tile for launching is Silverlight? Why in the world would Silverlight ever need a launcher? And why would that launcher ever need to be on the default start screen?